Brunch-Workshop

As part of the exhibition and project Testimony - Truth or Politics the workshop will include a guided tour by the curator
and a discussion on the role that socially owned property and self-management played in the constitution of the Yugoslav society
and their destiny when it was destroyed. With the current discussions on commons, migration, nationalism, etc. we find this
experience highly informative.

The generic political subject “working People” (radni narod) through its self-management and the socially owned property (društvena
svojina) were the basis for the constituting and maintaining the Yugoslav society. The erosion of these political concepts
can be traced back as far as the economic reforms of 1962/63 and 1965 which some of the testimonies gathered in the project
Naming IT war locate as the beginning of the war. The constitution of 1974 depoliticized concept of the working People by
turning the self-management system into a system of cooperatives and adding the individualistic-atomized concept of citizen
as a political subject. By changing the concept of society from a generic political concept to an ontological conglomerate
of individuals the socially owned property was turned into a share-holding company that could be easily privatized and was
only kept together by the authority of the Party. However, this same constitution weakened the federal power of both state
and party and prepared the grounds for secession. The demand for a multi-party system first on a national (republic) level,
was the last blow to these concepts since that meant on the one hand bringing people back to the concept of a nation state
i.e. nationalism and the destruction the symbolic capital of Yugoslavia and on the other hand, the nationalization/privatization
of the monetary and physical (industry and infrastructure) socially owned property in order to finance the newly established
parties.